Power outage in Texas: Why natural gas declined during winter storm

Failures in Texas’ natural gas operations and supply chains due to extreme temperatures are the leading cause of the power crisis that left millions of Texans without heat and electricity during the winter storm that swept the United States.

From frozen natural gas wells to frozen wind turbines, all sources of power generation experienced problems during the winter storm. But Texans rely heavily on natural gas for power and heat generation, especially during peak use, experts said.

Officials from the Texas Electric Reliability Board, or ERCOT, which manages most of the Texas network, said the cause of the outages Tuesday was apparently the state’s natural gas suppliers. Many are not designed to withstand such low temperatures on equipment or during production.

According to some estimates, nearly half of the state’s natural gas production came to a standstill due to the extremely low temperatures, while freezing components at natural gas power plants forced some operators to shut down.

“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin. While he said that all the energy sources in Texas are to blame for the power crisis – at least one nuclear power plant partially shut down, especially – the natural gas industry produces significantly less power than normal.

“Gas is currently failing in the most spectacular way,” Webber said.

According to Dan Woodfin, a senior director of ERCOT, more than half of ERCOT’s winter generating capacity, driven primarily by natural gas, was offline due to the storm.

The interruptions during this storm far exceeded what ERCOT predicted in November for an extreme winter event. The forecast for peak demand was 67 gigawatts; the peak consumption during the storm on Sunday was more than 69 gigawatts.

It is estimated that about 80% of the grid’s capacity, or 67 gigawatts, can be generated by natural gas, coal and nuclear power. Only 7% of ERCOT’s predicted winter capacity, or six gigawatts, is expected to come from various wind power sources across the state.

Woodfin said Tuesday that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, is offline and that 30 gigawatts of thermal resources, including gas, coal and nuclear energy, are offline.

“It seems that many of the generation that went offline today were mainly due to problems with the natural gas system,” Woodfin said during a Tuesday call with reporters.

The production of natural gas in the state has plummeted, making it difficult for power plants to get the fuel needed to power the plants. Natural gas power stations usually do not have much fuel storage on site, experts said. Instead, the plants rely on the constant flow of natural gas from pipelines that run across the state from areas like the Perm Basin in West Texas to large demand centers like Houston and Dallas.

In early February, according to S&P Global Platts, Texas operators produced about 24 billion cubic feet a day. But on Monday, production in Texas dropped to a fraction of that: state operators produced between 12 and 17 billion cubic feet a day.

The systems that get gas from the earth are not properly built for cold weather. Analysts in the Permian Basin of West Texas, one of the most productive oil fields in the world, are particularly struggling to bring natural gas to the surface, analysts said, as cold weather and snow close wells or cause power outages that prevent fossil fuels from being pumped . from the ground.

“Collectible lines freeze and the wells become so cold that they cannot produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst at S&P Global Platts. “And pumps use electricity so they can not even lift the gas and liquid, because there is no power to produce.”

Texas does not have as much storage capacity as other states, experts said, because the resource-laden state can easily pull it off the ground when needed – usually.

From the storage space that the state does have, it is difficult to access the resources. Luke Jackson, another natural gas analyst at S&P Global Platts, said that the physical extraction of stored natural gas is slower than the immediate, immediate supply of lines from production and that it is insufficient to make up for the dramatic drop in production.

Some power stations were already offline before the start of the crisis, experts said. ERCOT expected four gigawatt maintenance interruptions during the winter. Power stations in Texas usually do maintenance and updates to their plants during the typically mild winter months in preparation for the extreme electricity and power demand during the summer. It also limits the supply of the network.

Another winter problem: heating homes and hospitals by burning natural gas.

“In the summer, you do not have as much direct combustion of natural gas,” said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, pointing out that demand in the summer months during peak consumption is everything. for electricity.

The last time the state experienced a major freeze like this was a decade ago in 2011. At that time, natural gas generation was also experiencing problems – if ERCOT had not reduced the load due to the glowing eclipses applied during the storm , it would have resulted in a widespread federal report of the storm disappearing across the region.

It is possible to “winter” natural gas power stations, natural gas production and wind turbines, experts said, preventing such major disruptions in other states with frequent extreme winter weather. But even after upgrades were made after the 2011 winter storm, many Texas generators have not yet made all the necessary investments to prevent the outages with the equipment, experts said.

ERCOT directors also said the storm made a turnaround in the early hours of Monday this week when unusually low temperatures forced many more generators offline than ERCOT expected.

“It turned out that the winterization we were doing was working, but this weather was more extreme than (previous storms),” Woodfin said. “The loss of generation during the morning of Monday, after midnight, was really the part that made it a more extreme event than we had planned.”

Upgrading equipment to withstand exceptionally low temperatures and other changes, such as offering customers incentives to save power or upgrade to smart devices, can help avoid disasters like these, said Le Xie, a professor of electrical engineering. and computer engineering at Texas A&M University, said. assistant director of energy digitization at A & M’s Energy Institute.

“We used to not be too worried about such cold weather in places like Texas, but we should probably get ready for more in the future,” Xie said. With climate change, he said: “We are going to have more extreme weather conditions across the country.”

– Jolie McCullough reported.

Disclosure: Rice University, Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin were financial backers of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, non-party news organization funded in part by donations from members, foundations, and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of these.